Sharp_Objects

The yellow IROC rumbled up next to me, Amma and Kylie sharing the front passenger’s seat. A scraggly haired boy wearing gas-station shades and a stained undershirt was in the driver’s seat; his skinny doppelgänger in back. Smoke rolled out of the car, along with the smell of citrus-flavored liquor.
    “Get in, we’re going to party a little,” Amma said. She was a proffering a bottle of cheap orange-flavored vodka. She stuck her tongue out and let a raindrop splash on it. Her hair and tank top were already dripping.
    “I’m fine, thanks.”
    “You don’t look it. Come on, they’re patrolling the park. You’ll get a DUI for sure. I can smell you.”
    “Come on, chiquita,” Kylie called. “You can help us keep these boys in line.”
    I thought about my options: Go home, drink by myself. Go to a bar, drink with whatever guys floated over. Go with these kids, maybe hear some interesting gossip at the very least. An hour. Then home to sleep it off. Plus, there was Amma and her mysterious friendliness toward me. I hated to admit it, but I was becoming obsessed with the girl.
    The kids cheered as I got in the backseat. Amma passed around a different bottle, hot rum that tasted like suntan lotion. I worried they’d ask me to buy them liquor. Not because I wouldn’t. Pathetically, I wanted them to just want me along. Like I was popular once again. Not a freak. Approved of by the coolest girl in school. The thought was almost enough to make me jump out of the car and walk home. But then Amma passed the bottle again. The rim was ringed with pink lip gloss.
    The boy next to me, introduced only as Nolan, nodded and wiped sweat off his upper lip. Skinny arms with scabs and a face full of acne. Meth. Missouri is the second-most addicted state in the Union. We get bored down here, and we have a lot of farm chemicals. When I grew up, it was mostly the hard cores that did it. Now it was a party drug. Nolan was running his finger up and down the vinyl ribbing of the driver’s seat in front of him, but he looked up at me long enough to say, “You’re like my mom’s age. I like it.”
    “I doubt I’m quite your mom’s age.”
    “She’s like, thirty-three, thirty-four?” Close enough.
    “What’s her name?”
    “Casey Rayburn.” I knew her. Few years older than me. Factory side. Too much hair gel and a fondness for the Mexican chicken killers down on the Arkansas border. During a church retreat, she told her group she’d tried to commit suicide. The girls at school started calling her Casey Razor.
    “Must have been before my time,” I said.
    “Dude, this chick was too cool to hang with your druggie whore momma,” the driver said.
    “Fuck you,” Nolan whispered.
    “Camille, look what we got,” Amma leaned over the passenger’s seat, so her rear was bumping Kylie’s face. She shook a bottle of pills at me. “OxyContin. Makes you feel real good.” She stuck out her tongue and placed three in a row like white buttons, then chewed and swallowed with a gulp of vodka. “Try.”
    “No thanks, Amma.” OxyContin is good stuff. Doing it with your kid sister isn’t.
    “Oh, come on, Mille, just one,” she wheedled. “You’ll feel lighter. I feel so happy and good right now. You have to, too.”
    “I feel fine, Amma.” Her calling me Mille took me back to Marian. “I promise.”
    She turned back around and sighed, looking irretrievably glum.
    “Come on, Amma, you can’t care that much,” I said, touching her shoulder.
    “I did.” I couldn’t take it, I was losing ground, feeling that dangerous need to please, just like the old days. And really, one wasn’t going to kill me.
    “Okay, okay, give me one. One.”
    She immediately brightened and flung herself back to face me.
    “Put out your tongue. Like communion. Drug communion.”
    I put out my tongue and she set the pill on the tip, and squealed.
    “Good girl.” She smiled. I was getting tired of that phrase today.

    W e pulled up outside one of Wind Gap’s great old Victorian mansions, completely renovated and repainted in ludicrous blues and pinks and greens that were supposed to be funky. Instead the place looked like the home of a mad ice-cream man. A boy with no shirt was throwing up in the bushes to the side of the house, two kids were wrestling in what was left of a flower garden, and a young couple was in full spider embrace on a child’s swing. Nolan was abandoned in the car, still running his fingers up and down that piping.